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Thursday, February 18, 2010

Today in Class: Ignore the Degrees on the Wall

Today in class, my students are using Apple Laptops to do a research project (our school may have goats in the backyard and be surrounded by nothing but farms, but we do have a technology grant that freaking rocks).

Anyway, a lot of the kids hate Macs--they don't know the shortcuts and aren't as comfortable with them. A common problem is they'll open an application such as Word, and not know that they need to open a document within Word. The application will be on, in other words, but there won't be any document to type in.

Kid: Mrs. Revis! I can't figure this stupid thing out! Where is Word?

Me: *walk over without saying anything, press command and the letter N as the shortcut to open a new document, start to walk away*

Kid: Whoa....wow.... she just, like, touched it and now it works.

Other Kid: Wow. I guess some teachers are getting smarter now.

UPDATE:
A kid asked me for tape for her project.

Me: Sorry--I don't have tape.

Kid 1: What kind of teacher doesn't have tape?

Me: I had tape before I left, but it disappeared while I was gone. I guess one of the kids or the sub stole it.

Kid 2: Who would steal tape?

Kid 1: Well, YOU stole Teacher X's stapler!

Kid 2: Yeah, but that's not tape! I wouldn't steal tape!

Me: Why did you steal Teacher X's stapler?

Kid 2: Cause I don't like him.

Me: You know the school buys the staplers, right? All he had to do was go back to the office and get another one.

Kid 2: Well, he didn't have any staples to staple his papers together that night, then, did he?